Victory and Defeat

a short addendum to yesterday's dispatch

A classic PNW hike in early spring (yes, that’s me)

Greetings All,

Today, I am thinking about seasons.

It’s definitely spring, here in the Pacific Northwest, which basically means the same grey, rainy days as winter, just slightly less gloomy, with an occasional really beautiful day whose promise that more-of-the-same is to come we know better than to trust.

Just a bit ago, it was still winter. Grey, rainy days, short ones, deciduous trees green with only moss and lichen, the smell of decay in the air. Not in a bad way, just what is expected during the dark time of the year, here, where I’ve lived now for 15 years.

But what’s got me thinking about this is that it’s technically still “winter” here. “Spring” starts for us northern hemisphere folks on March 21st, the vernal equinox. So despite looking a lot like spring time, it is not “spring” yet at all.

One might think at first, “oh, that’s just our way of arbitrarily dividing the year into seasons; of course reality will not follow the hard lines our culture draws in the sand.”

And while I generally appreciate and subscribe to that kind of thinking myself, in this case, the reality is more complicated than that. Because these dates are not arbitrary definitions created by society as a “good enough” common measurement; they are based upon the actual rotation of our earth in relation to its sun.

Solstices are times when the earth’s tilt towards or away from the sun comes to a still point, the brief pause-before-turning that we can all relate to if we spend any time attending to our own breath. And of course, equinoxes are the time when the balance between the day and the night are equal; the earth is halfway through its journey to the next still point.

And here’s my point: winter, the season of bitter cold and death (at least historically speaking, in modern times it’s more the season of annoyance and inconvenience, the blessings of which we should perhaps pay a biiiit more attention to but I digress…), winter begins when the earth has already finished shortening its days.

Throughout the entire “season” of “winter,” the days are already getting longer, the light is already returning, and the earth (our section of it anyway) is already coming more alive. Despite it being the harshest part of the death season, our rescue from it has already begun as “winter” starts.

The same is true, of course, of “summer;” by the time we are appreciating the warmth and new life of the summer season, that solstice still point has already passed us by. Throughout all of “summer,” the days are getting shorter and shorter.

All of which is already mind blowing to me, but I don’t think it’s the deepest thing we can learn from this. As much as “days shorter = summer and fall + days longer = winter and spring” messes with my own on-the-ground experience of those seasons, it also makes me wonder where else this kind of mis-measurement might be happening.

We are all inhabitants of this planet, after all, and its rhythms entrain us on a deeply unconscious level. And right now, the season of death is running rampant across our culture. Pedophilia, war, plague, fascism, genocide… Frustration, powerlessness, fear, rage, confusion, anxiety…

Outwardly and inwardly both, the “light of day” seems to be fading and fading, even as those of us who care (and I believe there are many more of us who do than who don’t) struggle to hold onto the light within. To many, it seems hopeless.

Yet, if we were to guess the tilt of the earth by our experience of its seasons, we would assume the light of day was still fading in the winter. And it is quite objectively not.

This is not even: “it’s darkest before the dawn.”

This is: “it’s coldest after the light has already started returning.”

Now does that mean that the light of day for our culture is returning? Not necessarily; I think it would be foolish to prognosticate such a potentially false hope at this time of monsters and the unknown. We cannot guess the length of the cycle we are riding here. It may be quite a long time before the light comes back.

But the dance of the sun and the earth tells us: we can trust that the light always comes back. And, when it does, we can also trust that the worst days are still ahead and that the worst days are almost over.

May we all live to see those days.

Yours in solidarity,
Ian Reclusado
of The Kind Knife